Knowledge in a Perfect Storm
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In this presentation, I explore the prospects for subjectivities that might collaborate with indigenous ecological projects under the conditions of climate change, without controlling them. Intimations for subject positions of this kind may lie, following Mark Fisher and Nina Power, with a form of hope that ‘haunts’ rather than ‘promises’. I draw upon a particular archive of writing to explore this possibility: a set of reflections published on the 14-year collaboration between scientists from Otago University and the people of Rakiura on the ecology of mutton-birds (the sooty shearwater). Pākehā contributions to cross-cultural knowledge production, the archive suggests, find themselves moving between linear and retroactive temporalities as used within scientific disciplines to map causal relationships. Indigenous forms of explanation are seen to build exclusively upon retroactive forms of causality and are routinely ‘positioned’ in the archive as being secondary in explanatory power to the linear forms of explanation that characterise the scientific model. The movement of retroactive causality nevertheless structures each of the scientists’ reflections, thereby turning up throughout the texts ‘out of place’. As a consequence, retroactive time has the potential to inaugurate a state of haunting. Another form of haunting also emerges within the archive, in the form of a spectral standpoint from which it is envisaged that the movements between temporalities/causal forms can be witnessed. The seminar explores the implications and prospects of these hauntings for collaborative knowledge production, under the impress of climate change as an externalisation of capital’s contradictions.